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From a Master of Weather, 4 Waterfalls for New York

The artist Olafur Eliasson at Pier 17, in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, one site for his new project.Credit
Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

On an unusually cold and rainy spring afternoon, Olafur Eliasson was huddled under a large umbrella in Lower Manhattan gazing down the East River toward Governors Island.

“You could be in Sweden or Denmark,” he said of the gray, even light. “Fog makes everything more explicit. See how Governors Island fades in the rain?”

It seemed fitting that Mr. Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist who is world-famous for creating his own weather systems, was enveloped in a misty landscape that could well have been of his own making.

He had traveled straight from the airport to Pier 35 on the East River after flying in from his home and studio in Berlin. He has been a familiar presence at the site for the last several months, having visited every two weeks to check on the progress of his “New York City Waterfalls.”

His much-publicized $15 million initiative is to create four waterfalls ranging from 90 to 120 feet in height that will appear from June 26 to Oct. 13 and run from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. In addition to the waterfall at Pier 35, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, there will be one in Brooklyn at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, another between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and a fourth on the north shore of Governors Island.

Organized by the nonprofit Public Art Fund and the city of New York, it is being billed as the city’s biggest public art project since “The Gates,” the $20 million effort by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in which 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels were positioned along Central Park’s pathways for 16 days in 2005.

It is also Mr. Eliasson’s first public art project in New York. When he proposed the idea to the Public Art Fund, Susan K. Freedman, the organization’s president, decided that such an undertaking could be accomplished only with the city’s heft behind it. “It was too ambitious,” she said. “This has been two intense years of getting permits and making sure it was environmentally safe.”

Photo

The artist Olafur Eliasson plans to build a waterfall between Piers 4 and 5.Credit
Bernstein Photography, Courtesy Public Art Fund

Altogether, at least 108 people have been involved, including engineers, scientists, divers, scientists, riggers and environmentalists.

As has often been the case with arts projects, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s office was eager to be involved. “The mayor is always looking for new ways to showcase New York,” said First Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris. She added that several city and state agencies also played a role. “There’s never been a manual for how to put waterfalls in the East River,” she explained.

Ms. Harris said she hoped this multiborough project would attract visitors, just as “The Gates” generated an estimated $254 million in economic activity for the city. Hotels are offering special waterfall packages. Tourist agencies are planning bicycle and boat tours. The Circle Line Downtown will be running special waterfall excursions, too, some of them free, with an audio introduction by Mr. Eliasson.

City officials and the Public Art Fund say that no city money is being used to pay for the waterfalls, with all of the funds coming from foundations, corporations and private supporters.

The spot where Mr. Eliasson paused on that recent rainy day, an esplanade frequented by joggers and dog walkers as well as tourists visiting Lower Manhattan, holds a particular fascination for him. “From here you can see all four sites at once,” he said.

An intense man with a small frame and rumpled brown hair, the artist, 41, in flawless English, tried to explain the mechanics of his project. All that was visible that afternoon were several steel scaffolding constructions on the shoreline by Pier 35, floating black devices to prevent boats and fish from interfering with underwater filters.

A cage beneath the river’s surface pumps water through a pipe running upward along the scaffolding, shooting it through a trough at the top and then down the other side to frothy effect.

Mr. Eliasson said he purposely left the scaffolding highly visible. “Scaffolding is not an unfamiliar structure in New York,” he said. “You see it on every construction site in the city. I want people to know that this is both a natural phenomenon and a cultural one.”

Photo

Another waterfall is planned for the Brooklyn Bridge.Credit
Bernstein Photography, Courtesy Public Art Fund

He said he designed the scaffolding to match the scale of the surrounding buildings so it would blend into the urban landscape. Once the waterfalls are turned on, their sound will meld with the other sounds of the city.

Mr. Eliasson is an old hand at creating ephemeral atmospheres. Perhaps his best known is “The Weather Project,” an installation in 2003 inside the cavernous Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London. That consisted of a giant sun created from hundreds of light bulbs placed at the top of one wall, a mirrored ceiling and a mist machine. Over six months, it attracted more than two million visitors.

Given that much of New York City is surrounded by water, the idea of creating waterfalls seemed obvious to Mr. Eliasson, who suggests that New Yorkers are not as strongly connected to their waterfronts as urban Europeans are.

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Throughout history, he said, New Yorkers “have always taken water for granted.” He added: “Now people can engage in something as epic as a waterfall, see the wind and feel its gravity. You realize that the East River is not just static.”

These are not Mr. Eliasson’s first waterfalls. In 2005, for instance, he fashioned a 20-foot-tall waterfall in a small garden on the campus of Dundee University in Scotland. At the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, he created a reverse waterfall in 1998, devising pumps and a basin that sent the water traveling uphill. That project is on view through June 30 as part of “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson,” a midcareer retrospective and two-part exhibition at P.S. 1 and the Museum of Modern Art.

Artists throughout history have found romance in waterfalls, of course. In the United States, Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand all included them in their landscapes.

“Viewers will be seeing something they know from a picture, but now they will be experiencing them as a physical thing,” Mr. Eliasson said.

Unlike the much-trumpeted opening of “The Gates,” the artist said, he expects no official celebratory fanfare when the waterfalls are finally up and running.

“It’s important to be very straightforward and not to overamplify or overmystify things,” Mr. Eliasson said. “The waterfalls will just be turned on in the morning, and that’s it.”

Correction: June 4, 2008

An article on Monday about a project by the artist Olafur Eliasson to create four waterfalls in New York City misstated his age. He is 41, not 47.

“New York City Waterfalls” will run between June 26 and Oct. 13 at Pier 35; at the eastern foot of the Brooklyn Bridge; between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade; and on the north shore of Governors Island.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: From a Master of Weather, 4 Waterfalls for New York. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe